There is no need to go back in history to decompose into labour values the prices of things which were paid for at the beginning of the production round, in order to understand the impact of creating new value and surplus value on the dynamics of the system. It is no more necessary than it is in physical dynamics to decompose the momentum of an object that strikes another into all the forces that have previously acted on it to create that momentum, going right back to the foundation of the universe with the big bang; or than it is necessary in biology to know the whole history of the evolution of an organism, going right back to the first formation of organic life forms, in order to see what the effect of a genetic change will be in the present.
As Guglielmo Carchedi has pointed out, "If this critique were sound, it would mean the bankruptcy not only of Marx's transformation procedure but also of social science in all its versions" including those that criticise Marx:
This critique, in fact, would have to apply to any social phenomenon inasmuch as it is determined by other phenomena, both present and past. Social sciences, then, would become an endless quest for the starting point of the inquiry. 28
It would never be possible to analyse how some current actions related to the cumulative products of past actions.
Skilled and unskilled labour
The same dynamic character of Marx's model also dispels what has been presented from Bohm-Bawerk onwards as another problem for the labour theory of value. This is how the contribution of skilled labour to value creation is to be measured. Marx seems to see this as easily solved. He writes that:
skilled labour counts only as simple labour intensified, or rather, as multiplied simple labour, a given quantity of skilled being considered equal to a greater quantity of simple labour . . . The different proportions in which the different sorts of labour are reduced to unskilled labour as their standard, are established by a social process that goes on behind the back of the producers and, consequently, appear to be fixed by custom.29
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Understanding the System: Marx and Beyond